To put this meme in its proper context, and not what the right-wing echo chamber’s corporate taint-lickers have twisted it into:
Pelosi was responding to the absurd criticisms of the ACA that had absolutely zero basis in reality when she said that once the bill was passed, people would have the ability to see what was actually in it, as opposed to the “pull the plug on grandma”, “gubmint’s gonna take away your Medicare” fearmongering that Republicans had spent the previous 2 years fomenting. She knew exactly what was in it. So did Republicans. There was no secret hidden agenda that would only be revealed once the bill was passed; only the truth.
I forget if I posted this math in a previous thread, or if I’ve only ranted about it on Twitter, but here we go (with improved math either way, because I finally found the actual rate sheets):
Last year, I paid $4,820 for medical insurance. That’s 100% of my wife’s premium, plus 25% of my own. My employer covers the remaining 75% of my premium. All told, that’s roughly $6,250 for two people. Vision and dental insurance are about another $900. That doesn’t include the costs of medications, doctor’s visits, blood tests, or medical equipment (my CPAP costs about $800 per year to keep supplied), all of which comes out of pocket because of a better-than-most-plans-of-an-equivalent-cost $2,000 deductible.
Over the same period, I had just over $2,000 taken out of my paychecks for federal taxes (and with my tax return factored in, the total amount of federal taxes I paid was about $1,350). You would have to literally quadruple – if not quintuple – my federal taxes in order for a single-payer public insurance program to cost me the same as what I’m paying for private insurance (plus out of pocket expenses!) right now.
If you want to talk costs, I’m going to be paying for last year’s CPAP supplies until August of this year. Next month I’ll be paying off a 15 minute kidney ultrasound I got two years ago because it cost me almost $1,000. Back in 2010 I was charged over $300 for the privilege of having a camera shoved into my bladder so that I could be told that I’d probably passed a kidney stone (on top of the several hundred dollars in urgent care and emergency room bills I incurred because it turns out urine shouldn’t look like Hawaiian Punch).
Of course it’s not free. Only an idiot would think that an entire country’s health care infrastructure was being run without anyone paying a dime for it. (Well, there are morons like Rand Paul who equate Medicare for All with slavery, but I digress…) What it is is free at point of service. Just like public primary and secondary education in the US. There isn’t someone standing outside the school building asking for your $60 co-pay before they let your kid into class. And as I’ve pointed out, a public single-payer system would need to be stupefyingly inefficient – like, somehow even more inefficient than our existing dumpster fire of a system – in order for it to cost more than what we’re collectively paying right now. Even right-wing think tanks agree.
And if the right wing, which has never met a non-defense-related government program they thought could be done better and cheaper by the public sector, thinks the savings are $2 trillion over 10 years, it’s probably a good bet the actual savings would be even more substantial.
Good luck with that if you ever find yourself hit by a car and transported unconscious by an ambulance you didn’t choose to a hospital that you didn’t select where you receive a bunch of care from people you didn’t shop around for. Affordable health care should not depend on a person’s ability to haggle like they’re buying a fucking car.
In the meantime, can I borrow your galaxy brain to explain to my insurer why my in-network primary care physician no longer counts as a primary care physician despite being treated as one for the last 4 years? Because neither I nor my doctor’s office nor the provider’s billing department seem to be capable of doing so. This has been going on for 6 months now, and I have neither the time nor the energy to chase people down and sit through endless phone trees and figure out who needs to get these cryptic codes that get written down on post-it notes for me with no explanation. So I’m stuck with paying another $20 for my doctor’s visits.
I did my shopping around, and I’m still getting fucked. The entire system is garbage, and it needs to be destroyed root and branch.
For the sake of comparison, if insurance companies are averaging 3.1% profit and the rest of the allowable 15% in non-care spending is administration, that means their administrative overhead is about 12%. Meanwhile, Medicare’s administrative overhead is 1.4%.
How’s that for some savings?
